(Paperless) Towels

I don’t have a super long post for you today, because Krystopf and Atlas finally (after being fogged out and stuck in Halifax for a day) made it to Newfoundland this weekend and we only just got rid of them — I mean, bid them a fond farewell.

But I would like to know how you folks feel about paper towels.  Have you managed to eradicate them completely from your lives?  Do you know the trick to drying your hands in public using only one piece of paper towel?

We haven’t yet successfully eliminated paper towels from our household, but we’re working on it.  I bought a pack of 8 rolls of these recycled unbleached eco-friendly suckers  from Costco about four years ago, though, and we still have three rolls left.  So that’s something.  Currently we save our paper towel usage for draining bacon (though we could do that on a rack) and cleaning up dog vomit at 4:00 AM (though we could use cloths for that).

If you do a bit of poking around on the internet you’ll see a lot of people who come up with nifty solutions to the paper towel problem.  Most of them involve using nice absorbent flannel sheets.  In some cases, they’ve cut and hemmed the sheets to be the same size as a standard sheet of paper towel.  And if you want to get really fancy, you can attach snaps or velcro to the corners and have them all attach to each other so it fits on the paper towel roll.

But that seems complicated. What I have are just plain flannel sheets, which my mother lovingly serged for me and gave to me when the Pie and I moved in together.  That’s all you need.  Makes a great housewarming gift, and you can use them for anything, including a makeshift receiving blanket for babies (depending on the size, of course).

I’m not really sure who came up with this particular pattern, but it doesn’t really matter when  you’re wiping up spills.  You can even pick up old flannel sheets at thrift stores and cut them up for this purpose.  The best part of that is they’ve been washed so many times they’re already super-absorbent. The older it is the better!

Pseudo-Peonies

While the weather might be warmer than it was before, and while I pulled these lovely daffodils out of my garden last week …

… my garden still looks like this.  Which means that my peonies haven’t bloomed yet.  If they’re going to bloom at all.  And I like peonies.  They’re one of my favourites.

So I’m going to make my own here.  It’s not that hard.  I found a quick tutorial at Two Shades of Pink and had at it.

Start with a bunch of coffee filters.  I don’t know how many.  A bunch.

And some warm water.  And some food colouring.  Or watercolour paint.

Dissolve some of your paint/dye in the water. This is some Crayola stuff I broke off and stirred in.

I tried this craft paint but it wasn’t water soluble, not really.

Then dip your filters into the coloured water.  You can do a bunch at once. And they don’t need to sit in the water for more than a few seconds.

Experiment with the outer edges.

Versus the inside. Or the whole thing.

Squeeze out the excess dye with your hands.

I totally dyed my hand pink.

Spread out the filters to dry completely.

Mine took a few hours, less when I fully separated the layers and put them in a place with lots of air flow.

This is the full stack next day.

Now, in addition to the filters, you will need scissors, a stapler (with staples), and then some tape or wire (I have floral wire here).

Grab between 6 and 8 of the filters and stack them up.  Flatten them a bit with your hands.

Fold the filters in half, then half again so you have a little cone.

Take your scissors and scallop the rounded edge of the cone — don’t worry about perfection, it’s all good.

Now unfold the thing and ruffle it up a bit.  Pinch that spot at the very centre where you made your folds.

Flip the filters over and you can see what I mean by that pinch.

Staple over that pinched spot to hold things in place.

Now flip it back over and smooth it out a bit.

Pull up the edges of the topmost (innermost) filter and, working from the bottom, squish the filter in on itself, leaving a nice fluffy gathering on top.

Keep going with each successive layer.

Make sure to keep the top nice and fluffy, while still jamming the paper against itself.

Gather up the bottom layer and push it upwards, squeezing into the little handle you’ve created for yourself.

The paper will hold its shape for a short time, but you want to fix it more permanently.  You can use tape around the little nub here or floral wire, which is what I used.

I attached one flower to one end of the wire and another to the bottom.  What am I going to do with it?  I’m getting to that.

Because of the variation in the way I dyed the filters, you can see different colour gradations in the finished flowers.

On this one I put the darker filters in the middle.

This was the resulting bloom.

I used 8 filters per bloom and ended up with 18 flowers finished, which means I had 144 filters dyed.

When I was finished I gathered some of the blossoms that were tied together and I used an additional piece of floral wire to wind their stems together.

And it made two lovely little bouquets of 9 flowers each.

I don’t even want to talk about that horrible plaster job in the background.  The landlord took our chimney away and now I have no place to display my work.

So until I figure out how to compensate for my lack of a fireplace, I’ve put my pseudo peonies flanking my television.  Because I’m classy like that.

The things we do for love: Learning to Silk Screen at Home

Beware: this is a very long post!

Because I love my husband and because I support his weird video game addiction (I did make him a cake after all), I agreed to make up some t-shirts for an upcoming tournament in my hometown of Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, in May.

Screen printing in a studio is awesome and you can do all sorts of fun stuff.  And fortunately nowadays (unlike when my mother was an arts student), the materials you use won’t kill you.  Which means you can do this stuff at home, too!

DESIGN

First you need a design.  For our first attempts, we decided to work with something simple: a giant squid for myself.  Because I love giant squid.

After several attempts, I had something I liked.  I didn’t notice, however, that I’d put an extra tentacle on the thing.

But after photoshopping it looked pretty good.  Pick something simple with high contrast.

Then copy it onto a transparency — this way you won’t have to cut it out.  If you have a strongly black and white design you could just print it out in black on white paper and cut it out.

Now, the first time we tried this it didn’t work (I will show you that later), because the transparency printings weren’t as opaque as they should have been.

Having learned from that, we printed our images in triplicate, and lined them up.  You can see in the photos below how the opacity increases with each layer.

After carefully lining them up, tape them together with a bit of clear tape.

PREPARING YOUR SCREENS

And now for your screen.  We ended up buying a kit from Urchin downtown to get us started, but we also made a few of our own screens.

This is the Speedball screen that came with the kit.  This is the squeegee side, where you will burn your image and spread your ink.

Here is the print side, which will be going flush against your fabric.

To make your own screen, you need frames and screening.  Here I have some sheer polyester that I picked up from Value Village.  It’s denser than, say, pantyhose, which means that the details will come out much more finely, but it’s also hole-y enough that you can squeegee paint through it, which is kind of key.

And I have these picture frames, also from Value Village.  Take out the glass and the picture and everything and you can staple your fabric onto your frame using a staple gun.

Pull it relatively tight — not so much that it buckles or tears around the staples, but tight enough that there are no wrinkles and you could run a squeegee up and down it with no worries.

Give your finished screen a scrub with warm water and a bit of dish soap and leave it to dry.

Use tape to line around the outside of the frame on the screen so paint won’t go all over everything and make a mess.  I used hockey tape because it’s pretty waterproof and sticks well to fabric, but I’m sure there’s some specific tape you should really be using.

Do it again on the inside of the frame as well.

Oh yeah, and you need a squeegee.  If you don’t have one, you can get away with using a piece of stiff cardboard.  Who came up with the word SQUEEGEE anyway?  It’s fantastic.

Okay so we’re almost set here.  Do you have photoemulsion?  You should get some — it’s kind of key.  It’s a weird greenish stuff that will turn hard and waterproof under UV light.  I got the Speedball stuff that comes with the kit.  Make sure you follow the instructions on the back, as they’re all different.  Normally it comes in two parts: the dark green Diazo sensitizer, which comes in a wee bottle and you add water to it:

And the blue photo emulsion base, to which you add the Diazo sensitizer.  Once this is mixed, you can keep it in your fridge for several months.  So you see here that it is green, indicating its mixedness.

Spread the emulsion carefully and in a thin, even layer all over your screen, on the FRONT side, and the back side.  Use the squeegee to get a nice thin layer all over.  The first time we did it we spread it on too thick and as it dried it dripped.  Gross.

Quickly place the emulsified frame in a completely dark room.  Lay it horizontally to dry for a few hours.  Don’t let any light touch it.  A nice big closet or a well-sealed box is a good place.  Ideally you should set the screen bottom side down while you dry (not what is shown in this picture, because we did it wrong the first time), so you will need to prop the screen up so the wet side doesn’t touch your closet.

EXPOSING YOUR IMAGE

When you’re ready to burn the image onto your screen, you have to work quickly.  Some people like to expose their images inside, under high-wattage light bulbs, but we did ours on the cheap and exposed them outside on a sunny day.  Worked like a charm.

You’ll need your image (cut out from opaque paper or printed on transparency) and a sheet of glass that will fit inside the confines of your screen.  And a dark towel or thick piece of dark fabric for wrapping your frame in while in transport.

In the dark (we shut the curtains to our bedroom and I stood almost IN the closet while the Pie held the door mostly shut), lay your image on the inside of your frame (on the squeegee side, and orient it the way you want it to look when it’s printed (as in, you don’t need to mirror this).  Lay the sheet of glass on top so the image is fully covered and flattened down.

Now wrap the frame up in your dark towel so that the print side of the screen is resting on the towel, face down, and the rest is wrapped up around it.  Take it out in the sun and lay it in a flat, sunny spot.  Unwrap the towel so that the frame is resting completely on the dark surface (you want it flush so that there’s no chance of any reflection hitting the photo emulsion on the bottom and exposing it by accident).  You can see that the dried photo emulsion starts out green.

And then in a few minutes turns a nice bluish.  We left ours out for about ten minutes.  Then you need to wrap it back up in the towel like a burrito and take it back inside.

Now you need a source of high pressure warm water, like a sink sprayer or a shower head, and a nylon scrubbing brush (like a dish brush).

Working quickly, remove the wrapping, glass, and image from your frame and put it under the spray.  Use the scrub brush on the parts where your image is to get the unexposed photo emulsion off.  Scrub both sides vigorously until it comes clean.

If you exposed it correctly, the contrast between the blue exposed photo emulsion and the stuff you hid under your image will be quite good and the unexposed stuff will come right off. If you didn’t have an opaque enough image, then the contrast will not be good and the photo emulsion will not come off, and will in fact continue to expose as you work.

You can see this failed attempt only had a few spots that were truly opaque and so that was all that came off.

But this one worked pretty well, save for a bit around one tentacle that didn’t expose properly.  But I can live with that.

After you’ve gotten all the unexposed photo emulsion off, let the screen dry in the sun for a bit (this will also cure the remaining photo emulsion).

And here’s one that the Pie did for his video games.  He is using drawing fluid to fill in some pinholes in his exposed screen.

PRINTING

Make sure that you’ve washed and dried any fabric you are planning to print on first, to get rid of sizing and make sure that it has shrunk all it’s going to shrink.  I picked up this handful of t-shirts at Old Navy and Michaels for cheap.

Protect your work surface and wear an apron — fabric ink is permanent, after all.  If you’re printing clothing, put a piece of cardboard inside the t-shirt so that if ink comes through the fabric it won’t stain the other side.

Lay out your shirt flat and place the screen where you want it to go.  For our initial test we used a piece of scrap cotton.  Pour a line of ink on one side of the screen, on top of the emulsion.

Hold your squeegee at a 45° angle and using even pressure, pull the ink across the surface of your screen.  It helps if you have another pair of hands holding down the screen frame while you do this.  Do a second pass in the other direction.  Experiment with the pressure you put on and the number of passes you do until you are satisfied with how the ink looks on your fabric.

Ease the frame off the fabric on an angle (so that one side is still touching the surface if you need to put it back down) and set the fabric to dry.

On our second pass I tried a blend of two different colours.

I tried to repaint the missing tentacle. It didn’t go well.

My two shirts, one in greenish-gray and the other in silver.

The silver wasn’t as opaque as I’d like it, but it’s still nice.

And the Pie’s two shirts.

When we did the yellow one we forgot to re-fill the pinholes and you can see they came out onto the fabric.

When the paint is fully dry (give it an hour or two), place your shirt on an ironing board and, with a sheet of paper between your design and the iron (no steam!), run the iron on hot over the design for a few minutes.  This will “fix” the image and protect it from frequent washings.

Modeling.  Sorry for the selfies.

 

Silver on blue …

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Gray on orange …

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tada!

SCREEN CLEANUP

Unless you want to use those screens again, you’ll need to get the photo emulsion off as soon as possible.  I used the ScreenClean stuff that came with my kit, but you can also use 1 cup of washing soda dissolved in a gallon of warm water.

Use a paint brush to apply the cleaner to both sides of the screen and scrub briskly with a nylon brush.

Apply the cleaner again with the paintbrush to both sides and leave it to sit for about 5 minutes.

Run under a forceful stream of hot water and scrub again until all the emulsion and cleaner has washed away.

Wow, that was a lot to take in.  I hope it was easy enough to follow.  If not, please let me know!

PEOPLE WHO DID IT DIFFERENTLY:

Here are some of the links to the other sites I checked out to learn how do this stuff:

How to Screen Print! Silkscreening at home - The Art of Doing Stuff

Screen Printing: Cheap, Dirty, and at Home - Instructables

Top Ten Worst Screen Printing Mistakes - Adventures in DIY Screen Printing

DIY Screen Printing - I Love to Create

Cheap screenprinting tutorial - Craftgrrl

How to Silk Screen Posters and Shirts - No Media Kings

STAMPS

HAPPY BIRTHDAY MOMMA!

My mother, if you didn’t know, is an artist.  So when I was a kid, instead of playing around with construction paper and crayons (well, I still did that), I also got to experiment with India ink, French curves, and etching plates.  Let’s just say that for someone with little artistic skill I know my way around an arts supply store.

My mum and I tend to go off on artistic tangents when we’re together, and on a recent Skype conversation we got stuck onto stamps.  I have been collecting champagne corks for a few years now with the intention of turning them into nice little rubber stamps, so I figured, what better occasion than my mother’s birthday to try them out?

Generally when you make your own rubber stamps you use a special set of wee chisels that make your life so much easier.  Since I am incapable of doing anything that logical, I have a specialty set of craft blades instead. You also tend to use rubber, which has a more uniform consistency and is easier to cut. But what the hey.

So first you draw a design on your cork. I’m going with an A (for my name, natch). The bonus is it’s a symmetrical letter so I don’t have to worry about putting it on backwards or anything. Conveniently the Pie’s name also starts with an A so I’m killing two birds with one stone here. I will consider doing our last initials, B and F … some other time …

After I finalized the design I sent it to management for approval. Fortunately management was sitting on the arm of the couch while I was doing this so it didn’t take long for the paperwork to go through.

Then I set to with my wee knife, carving away at the negative space. Just remember, if you are using cork, that it’s a conglomeration of natural fibres, so things tend to come off in chunks. Also, please don’t cut off any of your fingers or stab yourselves. Blood does not make for a happy crafting occasion.

The finished A.

Testing it out. The uneven and pocked surface of the cork makes for that texture. If you use rubber (say, a Pink Pearl eraser), then you’ll have a much more solid fill on your stamp. Also now that I have three As in a row it looks like the sound someone makes when they fall off a high surface.

I tried to carve out a corgi. But then I accidentally cut off one of the eyes. The Pie said it just means that this corgi is winking.

So because this made me sad I made another stamp. I wish I’d had this one around when I was teaching and marking the papers of students who had not been paying attention. I like the deep disappointment that this stamp conveys.

I’m going to try this out with real rubber and tools eventually, but this is a good start, and I still have some blank corks left to try!

Quick Mouse Pad Re-Fit

I’ve had this mousepad since I got my first MacBook about eight years ago.  With an optical mouse, of course, I don’t actually NEED a mouse pad, but I don’t like rolling my hand over the relatively rough surface of my desk.  It makes me feel icky.  This mousepad, of course, has seen better days, and the cloth on top of the foam is peeling off.

Well, I have fabric, and I have fabric glue.  How hard can a re-fit be?

So first I peeled off the old fabric, which was some form of stretchy something.

I gave the neoprene base a bit of a rinse and scrub to get rid of the now powderized ancient adhesive and let it dry.  Then I set out my equipment: paint brush, fabric glue, scissors, and a piece of fabric.  Go with a fabric that feels okay against your wrist, because you will constantly be rubbing your wrist against it. This was a scrap leftover from a previous experiment making bow ties, and it was just the right width.

I used my paintbrush to slather fabric paint across the entire surface of the mousepad. Make sure to get it right to the edges, and don’t spread it on too thick. I may have gotten mine a little thick in some places and it showed through the fabric later. Not a huge deal, but if you’re a perfectionist, use caution.

Then I simply flipped it over and trimmed around the edges with scissors. Easy peasy.

All trimmed up and sitting to dry.

And that’s it. A new look in five minutes or less.

Guest Post: Renovating a TE Stick

Hooray, it’s our first guest post!  I helped the Pie re-do his MadCatz gaming stick back before Christmas and I’ve finally gotten him to agree to do a post about it.  Enjoy the geekery! – Ali

Hakan is my favourite character from Super Street Fighter 4, and I thought it would be fun to modify the artwork on my fight stick. Here is what it looked like before:

First you have to take it apart. I unscrewed the top and this is what the insides look like:

You have to remove the buttons and the stick in order to replace the artwork on the top. It’s a good idea to take a (blurry) picture of the buttons or write down the colour-coding of the wiring so that you can put it all back together in the proper order.

Blurry button removal:

This is the old art that I have removed and will be replacing.

I used a template, which I found on the Shoryuken Forums, to create my Hakan art. I printed it out in colour. Cutting out the circles with an exacto knife was the hard part.

To make cutting out the negative space easier I traced it on the old art.

All cut out. You don’t have to worry about those rough edges too much, as the button will cover those up.

Because the old art was printed on a piece of plastic, I had to print the new art on paper and then purchase a clear plexiglass cover from Canadian Joysticks to go on top. You can see that it is held in place with the buttons and stick. If you wish to get new buttons, this would be the time to replace them all. You can get new buttons and sticks from Akihabara and/or Canadian Joysticks.

This is where your earlier photo of where the wires go comes in handy.

Now for the ball top.  I followed this tutorial on the Shoryuken Forums for proper technique.

The first thing you need to do is sand your ball top to rough it up. Use a fine grade sandpaper for this, because you don’t want it TOO rough, just rough enough that the paint sticks.

I used Ali’s stale beer bread and a skewer as a prop to hold it up.

Next, you need to prime the ball. I used two coats of Citadel Imperial Primer in Skull White.  These are acrylic paints designed to be used for painting miniatures, and hold up well to handling.

Then I used painter’s tape to mask off the parts of the design I wanted to stay white (at least at first).

One million coats of red paint later, and Hakan’s skin was filled in.

Peel off the tape.

Hakan has turquoise hair. Because he’s awesome.

I used a permanent marker to add in eyebrows and a nose.

Then I coated the ball top in a clear sealant and put it back on the fight stick.

Hakan is awesome.

Pre-Spring Paper Tree

It may be spring where you are.  Here in St. John’s, however, we don’t put away our snow shovels until after the Victoria Day long weekend at the end of May.  It’s kind of the rule.

So in the absence of spring, I’ve decided to make my own.

Interfering a bit with my marine mobile while it’s at it.

This branch fell victim to yet another of our vicious wind storms last night and managed to scare the crap out of the dog by moving along the sidewalk just as he was about to sniff it this morning.  In retribution we captured it and will torture it into submission.

In actual fact one of the major branches on it was broken.  This branch was walking wounded.

So I fixed that up with some floral tape.

For this project you will need some paper.  It can be scrap booking paper, origami, magazine paper, whatever you want.  I picked a spring-themed magazine because I thought I could get the best colours from it.  I should have really cut out the paper in the shapes of leaves, but I’m super lazy so I used my 2″ circle punch instead.

Some floral wire, a pair of scissors, a paint brush, and some glue would also be handy.

So you start by cutting out your shapes. Whatever they’re gonna be. Us lazy people like our circles. It’s “modern”. Deal with it.

Then you put some glue on one side of a shape. Then you take a leaf-stem length of floral wire, bend it a bit so it won’t just slide right out again, and slap it on there, with another shape on top. BAM.

And then you do that a bunch more times. Until you run out of shapes. Or until you get bored and don’t want to make any more shapes.

Then you take your branch and anchor it in a sturdy vase.

And then you start winding the shapes onto the branches, following the line of the branch, bending them a little bit for depth. It ain’t that hard.

And you keep going.

Make sure to spread them out as you add them so that when you run out of shapes and don’t want to make any more you don’t end up with bare branches.

And then you put it somewhere and admire your handiwork!

Here it is on my mantle.

Quick and Easy Air Freshener

I love fresh air.  I’d rather be cold and have the windows open than be boxed in a stuffy house.  And commercial perfumes tend to aggravate my asthma, so if I can avoid them I will.

Spring is ALMOST at hand in Newfoundland, but the days when I can justify turning off the heat and leaving the windows wide open have yet to come.  And having an active dog and an active man in the house, coupled with the variety of things I cook, means our house could use a bit of fresh air during the winter months.

I saw this post from Smashed Peas and Carrots a while back and I thought it might be worth a try.

Basically all you need is a small jar, some baking soda, and some essential oils.  The original post required a mason-jar style lid, where the lid itself could be replaced with perforated scrapbook paper, a great way to personalize the jar.  I don’t have any scrapbook paper, so I decided to use fabric and elastics instead.

I also didn’t have any spare jars at the moment, but I had some large ramekins that were sitting around so I thought I’d use those instead.

So it’s simple: take about 1/2 cup baking soda and plop it in your jar.  Or bowl.  Or whatever.

Shake about 8-12 drops essential oil of your choice onto the baking soda.

Affix your lid, which could really be anything, provided it has holes for air to flow through.  I have a small patch of fabric here (charming thrifted vintage handkerchiefs) that I fixed in place with an elastic band.  Give the contents a gentle shake to mix them up a bit.

I made four separate bowls, for the main activity rooms in our house: tea tree for the bathroom, lavender for the bedroom, and orange for the living room.

As an experiment, I also tried some rose water in baking soda and put that in my office.  I doubt it will last as long as the ones with the essential oils in it, but it still smells lovely!

Keep the jars or bowls out of the sun in a place that gets good air circulation and I think they’ll probably last you at least a month, maybe two!

This one is on the table by the entrance to the dining room. We walk past this all the time, wafting air to and fro.

Pfft. I can do that: Ali Does It turns three!

Can you believe it?  I’ve been Doing It Myself for THREE FREAKING YEARS now!  Well, it’s been longer than that, but today marks the third anniversary of when I started putting my foibles and failures (and too many pictures of my dog) up on the internet for you to enjoy.  And I hope you’ve enjoyed it!

How to commemorate this, though?  I’ve been doing a lot of cooking, so I didn’t really want to do that.  And because Christmas is over and we’re moving in a couple months I don’t have any real crafty/fixy projects on the horizon.  But.  I saw this back on Etsy a year or so ago and I thought, I could TOTALLY make that myself.  It won’t be as GOOD, mind you, but I could totally do it.  So I’m gonna.  Here goes.

Because I can never do anything in half measures, I decided to make THREE bowls instead of just the one, and they’re gonna be nesting bowls.

So I needed three bowls of approximately the same shape but different sizes.  Fortunately I have three stainless steel ones that will do just fine.

You also need a barrier between the bowl and the paste.  You can use plastic wrap but I didn’t want to deal with wrinkles so I used petroleum jelly, which is the only thing I didn’t have on hand and had to buy.

I still have stacks and stacks of newspapers to use, and so I tore a bunch of those up into thin strips, following the grain of the paper.

And you need paste as well, obviously.  I went with the same recipe I used for the magnificent and popular papier mâché helicopter piñata I made a few years ago, which is 2 cups flour to 3 cups water.  BAM.

Make sure to spread newspaper or drop cloths or garbage bags on your work area so you don’t have to deal with errant splashes of dried paste later on.  This, incidentally, is a good project to do while watching movies/television on a bad-weather day.  I curled up with Supernatural, which is not a very good series, but that Jensen Ackles is pretty enough to make it worth watching, and the plot is never too heavy that I have to keep my eyes glued to the screen a hundred percent of the time.

Start by smearing the outside of your bowl with petroleum jelly.  Try to put it on as smoothly as possible, but make sure it’s pretty thick at the same time.  If you’re using plastic wrap, try to avoid too many wrinkles, and wrap the plastic around the edges of the bowl as well.

Then have at it, pasting up your strips of newsprint and sticking them to your bowl form.  Do a layer or two, allow it to dry completely, then do another one.  I did a layer, waited an hour, then did another layer and let that dry overnight, then repeated the process the next day.

This project will definitely take you a couple of days, so make sure to keep your paste tightly sealed when you’re not using it.

When the bowl is as thick as you want it to be, and it has dried all the way through, use a thin knife to carefully pry the bowl from the other bowl.

Wipe off any excess petroleum jelly or peel away the plastic wrap. I found that a cotton tea towel did the best job at getting all the petroleum jelly off.

Trim the edges of the bowl if you like with a sharp pair of scissors.

I left mine to cure another day like this, after sealing the open edges with some white glue.

I flipped the glue over and discovered that it was actually called Troll Booger Glue.  I can’t begin to tell you how delighted I was by that.

Now, the bowls on Etsy were lined with gold leaf, but I ain’t got the time nor the money for that.  I do, however, have some copper-coloured spray paint.  So I’m going to use that (taking all the necessary precautions, of course).

I couldn’t find my breathing mask so I went with a bandana.  The Pie took one look at me and started laughing so I thought I’d share.

If you’re using spray paint on your bowls, make sure to do the inside of the bowl first.  That way you can avoid getting the wrong colour on the wrong side of the bowl.

Once the inside is done and dried, flip the bowls upside down and do the outside, being careful to direct your spray so it doesn’t get underneath the bowls.  I used blue, white, and black.

It took a couple coats to make the lines of print disappear.  I thought I had some white spray paint but it turned out that I only had gesso.

And the gesso only worked so well so I ended up spraying over it with blue.  After that was fully cured, I gave it a once-over with some spray varnish, for added sheen and protection.

And that’s it.  Not bad, not bad at all.

Long-Distance Greeting

The Pie and I don’t usually celebrate Valentine’s Day, but I thought I would make up a little card for Cait and send it home to Ottawa.

The base is cardboard with construction paper overlaid on top and I used construction paper to make the “hinges” of the card.

The “clothing” for the figure on top is a textured origami.  The limbs are pipe cleaner and the heart is made of felt.  Heartfelt.  Get it?

I originally just had glue holding everything down, but you see I had to resort to tape. Alas.

Under the “clothing” is a hole to accommodate this chocolate bar (which I bought from the Newfoundland Chocolate Company here in St. John’s, specifically because their bars are small enough to fit in an envelope), which is wrapped in origami.

I used a circle punch to make confetti out of my paper scraps and stuffed a bunch of it inside the card so it will all fall out when she opens it.

♥ Happy Valentine’s Day! ♥